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Topic: Bacchus? (Read 405 times)

Here's the Bacchus (Hopefully) weight I mentioned in the Is this really Old English thread.The twisting canes in the first concentric circle and those in the next row are a match for a weight on page 21 (top right) of Robert Hall's book Old English Paperweights (book picture is by courtesy of Bill Volkman).

That is the one I said to them might be attributed to Bacchus by some, but that I felt uneasy about it. I agree about the match to the paperweight in Bob's book, but I disagree with quite a few of Bob's attributions. In my view about three quarters of the weights in the Bacchus chapter are 'classic Bacchus'; of the rest, some are not Bacchus, some are doubtful. When I started to measure the densities of Old English weights, around 2002, the results cast doubt on a number of Old English attributions. Bob and I struggled to make sense of the results, until we concluded there were more factories involved than people had previously assumed.

At the time Bob wrote his book there was less information available, and he did not distinguish between the various types of Queen's Head cane. The accepted wisdom in the second half of the 20th century was that a Queen's Head cane meant Bacchus - which turned out to be wrong: several companies inserted Queen's head canes. The problems of making such an attribution are apparent on page 31, for example, where he wrongly identifies a 'square bun' weight as Bacchus - then struggles to explain why the canes do not match classic Bacchus, and even goes on to suggest it might be an early Gillinder piece.

I agree your paperweight might be by Bacchus...but that is about as far as I would go!

Alan

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Alan"There are two rules for ultimate success in life. Number 1: Never tell everything you know."

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